Incremental Blogger

This is very cool. Nokia demoed a touch feedback system for its onscreen keyboard.

The trick is a piezo sensor below the key area. ““The basic technology is not that difficult,” he explained [Roope Takala], “We inserted two small piezo sensor pads under the screen and engineered in a 0.1mm movement in the screen itself. What’s taken the time has been fine tuning the movement and response to mimic exactly the sensation of pressing a real key.”

Interestingly, the feedback doesn’t increase the speed of typing. “Funnily enough, although you think you’re typing faster than normal because of the feedback, in actual fact you’re not,” said Takala, “There’s just some sort of mental satisfaction that comes from typing with a tactile response.”

When might this technology reach the market: “The new Haptikos technology will apparently be shipped with the upcoming Nokia S60 Touch phone that has been shown off at recent demos, and the team is busy working on the next challenge, which is to provide exact tactile replicas for scrolling and draw/paint programs.”

[Found at Red Ferret Journal]

Microsoft researcher Jim Gray is missing at sea while on a solo sailing trip. I hope Jim is found soon.

I met Jim randomly at a Microsoft event awhile back and had a highly memorable discussion with him about various technologies and the Tablet PC. He’s not only smart as Robert Scoble points out, he’s a genuinely nice person.

Other news covering Jim Gray:
Information Week: Jim Gray has “…teacher’s patience with my questions.”
San Francisco Chronicle: Jim “…apparently disappeared on a day cruise to the Farallon Islands.”
Seattle Post Intelligencer: “The Coast Guard searched all night with a C-130 plane”

Lots of great interest in ink blogging again–much of it courtesy of Live Writer and the possibilities of using this new beta app to blog with in ink.

Actually, Live Writer does not support ink directly although it does support plugins. So it’s great to see Ed Holloway take the lead here and create a ink plugin for Live Writer.

Unfortunately, the plugin has not worked for me, but I haven’t tried it on another Tablet to figure out what’s going on. Other people have had success blogging with Ed’s wonderful new tool though. I can’t wait to get running with it too.

Oh, and Darren Strange reminds us that Office 2007 supports blogging too. I think it’s great that OneNote is adding blogging support, however, for every day blogging use I imagine the special-purpose Live Writer tool will win out for me. Besides, my OneNote files are getting so jam packed with stuff I need to think about “using the program less” rather than more :-). I’ll have to see how this plays out though.

Lastly, plugins are nice and all that, however, I really, really wish Live Writer would support ink natively. Maybe this is too much to ask for a young product like Live Writer, but I can’t wait for the day when ink is considered on par with supporting pictures (or maps) in a program. Maybe the Tablet SDK needs to make ink support even easier? Hmm.

Lora asked me if I remembered drawing hand-print turkeys in kindergarten. I didn’t. So I tried using Journal. Ouch. I need to go back to school. Please, someone show me how it’s done.
Update: Lora’s turkey is looking pretty sharp.

If I were in New Zealand, I’d be sure to drop by the Tablet PC User Group meeting next Tuesday. A Toshiba rep is going to be there. I’d ask, “Is there going to be a newer version of the M200?”

“LeapFrog’s amazingly clever “pentop” computer is likely to be a hit.” [BusinessWeek. Found via Slashdot.]

Acer released their new C310 Tablet PC yesterday. Some details: 2.13 GHz Pentium M, 100GB drive, and 14.1″ display at 1024×768 resolution.

Reacting to the screen size, JK asks: “…if anyone can explain to me why such a large screen should be so low resolution then please do, I’m really interested.”

I’m guessing it’s cost more than anything else. However, I have a couple friends that run their 19+” desktop monitors at 1024×768–so to each his own.

In comparison, the Toshiba M4 also has a 14.1″ display though it includes a higher-res 1400×1050 display, which as a developer I’d prefer. I’m partial to the smaller Tablets though. I enjoy the carryability of my Toshiba M200 which has a 12.1″ display.

Good to see the Acer line of Tablet PCs grow though.

Agazeeri posts eleven reasons to buy a Tablet PC.

He lists the usual suspects: mobility, notetaking, ink enabled apps, and the like, but I think he’s most proud of the Sabrina Ferilli autograph he got on his Tablet (posted as reason #11). Yes, the Tablet PC is a great conversation opener–even with movie stars.

A friend was interested in showing his boss more about the Tablet PC so I emailed over a link to this Flash demo:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/tabletpc/evaluation/tours/mmtour/index.html

The Flash presentation does a pretty good job of showcasing the Tablet PC in an office environment. It’s broken into three sections that discuss the power, mobility, and versatility of Tablets as well as an interactive demo that shows a day in the life of a Tablet user.

Note: You’ll want to have audio for playback. There is no read-along text.

Amazon is taking pre-orders for Portable Media Center. From th eAmazon page:

Q: What are Portable Media Centers?

A: Windows Mobile-based Portable Media Centers are handheld devices that play recorded TV, movies, home videos, music, and photos transferred from a PC with Windows XP.

Q: What can I play on a Portable Media Center?

A: Portable Media Centers play more than just music. You can also play video, such as TV shows recorded on your PC, home video and movies downloaded from the Internet, and you can view digital photos anywher

Q: What PC operating system do I need in order to use a Portable Media Center?

A: Portable Media Centers will work with any version of Windows XP, including Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional Edition, and Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. Because of its TV-recording capabilities, a PC with Windows XP Media Center Edition is recommended.
e and anytime.

Q: Can I connect my PMC to a TV or stereo?

A: Yes, content stored on your Portable Media Center can be projected to a TV, or a car or home stereo using the device’s “audio-video out” options and a composite video cable. The devices will support both NTSC (United States) and PAL (Europe and Asia) TV output settings.

There’s more info at the link above.

[Found at Joe Wilcox]

These sound like great Tablet features too. I’m sure we’ll continue to see a merging and splitting of various devices over the coming years as companies explore different markets.

I like the idea of very small devices, like PMCs. They’re easy to carry and often have well tuned user packaging and experiences. Tablets can learn a thing or two from them. In fact, when I see small devices, such as these, one of the first thoughts that comes to mind is whether an ink-capable digitzer can be practically integrated in. I’d like to see ink supported in more devices–especially in some instant-on devices.

Inspired by Steve Job’s CoreImaging demo the other day, Bryan and I have been messing around with the High Level Shader Language (HLSL) programming language this evening. I downloaded NVIDIA’s FX Composer for fun which enables you to play around with shading effects. Interesting. I didn’t know this stuff existed in DirectX9.

Chris Coulter’s desciption on Evan’s blog of a Tablet event that he’d like to see kind of reminds me of the beginnings of the West Coast Computer Faire. OK, maybe not quite the same. But since I found this link to the 8th annual West Coast Computer Faire, I thought it would be great fun to use it. Remember ATARIs and 6502s. Hehe. (Oh, and here’s a picture of a 1978 flyer for the first WCCF. A lot of great companies spawned from conferences like these.

Evan Feldman continues with his explanation of how the Tablet PC design evolved.

For a new product–like the Tablet PC–in a relatively unknown market, with potentially unknown users, over-thinking and designing in too many features in anticipation of a market is a sure-fire way to create too expensive and complex of a product–which to make matters worse can’t be rapidly tuned later.

What I find so fascinating about markets and new products–and what Evan lightly touches upon–is the value of the early adopters. What would Tablet exposure and viability be like today without the “non-goal” customers who created TabletPCBuzz, TabletQuestions or TabletPC2. Take away the non-corporate Tablet blogs (are there any corporate ones?). Take away the early adopters that gravitated to the product because of its “promise” but have stuck with it because of its value. Where would the Tablet PC be then? Would the corridor warrior market be enough to keep the OEMs satisfied? What would the press be saying?

So has the Tablet PC hit a sweet spot? If user enthusiasm is any indication, the answer is “almost.” And others are taking notice. So many people were rightly skeptical from the beginning. But the buzz is not just PR hot air, its users taking notes, filling out forms, reading webpages, passing photos around on the Tablet, drawing, sketching, and most importantly developing new apps for the Tablet PC.

Larry O’Brien suggests a cell-based visual programming language. Interesting thought.

Mostly because of TabletPCPost, I downloaded several of the Microsoft Tablet PC PowerToys–some of which I had’t tried in a long while.

I ran across a couple things that caught my attention:

I couldn’t get the New York Times crossword puzzle program to download a puzzle. I keep geting an error message that suggests that I check my Internet connection or clock. Anyone else running into this?

And the extremely attractive pool program crashed numerous times until I finally realized I had to exit just about everything I was running as well as run the program in primary landscape mode. The Pool program is probably the slickest looking PowerToy. Compare it to the latest Dots PowerToy, for instance. Looks like it needs a little tweaking to make it more portrait and memory friendly though.

And what about my favs?

My favorite-tech PowerToy is hands down the Snipping tool–professionally done and easy to use. It comes in handy for grabbing screenshots, although I wish it could publish to my MovableType blog. (This just goes to show you how standards change. I never would have considered this an issue before. But for community-focused PowerToys, blogs are important to support.)

The Dictionary Tool (written by Shanine Omar) is also at the top of my “most-often-used” PowerToy–even though I rarely think about it. It’s a great transparent program. It simply makes my handwriting recognition work better–especially with all my awkward program names. Great job Omar.